‘Consumer awareness key to fight mobile money fraud’
The Principal Consultant of e-Crime Bureau, Mr Albert Antwi-Boasiako, has reiterated the need to create customer awareness as part of efforts to fight mobile money fraud.
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He said citizens who used the service must be made aware of the associated risks so they could take the necessary precautions in the face of the increasing rate of mobile money fraud.
In an interview after an orientation workshop on Mobile Money Fraud on March 28, Mr Antwi-Boasiako said “the first thing you take into consideration to address mobile money fraud is to create awareness. Citizens who are patrons of the service should be aware of the risks so they can take the necessary precautions at the individual level.”
He stated that some of the fraud bothered on identification issues and it was, therefore, expected that when the country rolls out the National Identification System, it would help.
“Currently, we have fictitious IDs which are being used to perpetuate the fraud but we expect that as the nation rolls out the national identification system, that would help,” he said.
Infrastructure security
Mr Antwi-Boasiako also reiterated the need to have security around mobile devices as perpetrators of fraud capitalised on vulnerability of devices to undertake their activities.
“We also want a bit of security on our infrastructure. We have instances where criminals are taking over smart devices that are used to intercept PIN numbers. These are technical issues, but it also bothers on the user behaviour. If the system is compromised with malicious programmes, invariably you are attracting Trojans and malware that could affect credentials. We need to have security around our devices,” he said.
He said the failure of mobile device users to have anti-viruses on their phones showed the huge level of vulnerability.
“There are certain websites which are risky. If you are on the turret websites where everybody downloads audio and videos, then you are exposed to lot of malicious programmes. If you have the culture of watching pornography on your mobile devices, and you don’t have protection, it is another way of getting the malware,” he said.
He added: “You have to access credible websites in order to stay secure from some of the threats from our e-platforms.”
The workshop
The workshop was organised by the Journalists for Business Advocacy (JBA) in collaboration with MTN Ghana to create awareness of the increasing rate of fraud through mobile money transactions.
The President of the JBA, Mr Suleiman Mustapha, urged journalists to make conscious efforts to educate the public on the increasing menace of mobile money fraud.
The JBA, he said, would make a sustained advocacy to ensure the general public is increasingly aware of the threats posed by fraudsters using mobile money. — GB
